Poland's Big Party

Its past abounds with dragons, its streets teem with treasures, its economy is on a roll, and its nights are nonstop. Guy Martin tastes the heady Krakovian cocktail of the historic and the hip

Kraków wears its medieval raiment without fuss or complication, as a dowager would strap on jewels and fur although she’s only stepping out for a quart of milk—the stuff’s here, so I’m wearing it, baby. This feisty little town of 800,000 definitely has the stuff: Europe’s largest and arguably most gracious medieval square, the Rynek Główny; Europe’s largest Gothic altar, by Veit Stoss; the three-hundred-foot-long neo-Byzantine Sukiennice, the Cloth Hall market; the serried Piast and Jagiellonian kings snug in their heavy stone sarcophagi under Wawel Cathedral on the fifteen-acre Wawel Royal Castle hill.

They were Poland’s first and greatest kings, who ran a most profitable empire astride the west end of the Silk Route from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. Their treasures, their castles, and their many churches are the bedrock of identity for the country. Whether it’s the old flower sellers on the Rynek Główny, or a platoon of nuns who seem not to walk over the cobbles so much as float, or the party-hearty habitués of the Kazimierz bars howling at the dawn, all of Kraków’s people draw some filigree of confidence from living atop and around these fantastically lively old things, made when Poland was most regal and most proud.

Kraków celebrates and grooms its historical otherness. The loopy, medieval found-poetry of kings’ nicknames is worth savoring, along with their real or imagined deformities: Boleslaw the Wry-Mouthed, Mieszko Tanglefoot, Władysław Spindleshanks, to name just three. But the city’s love of quirk harks back further—the founding myth of the city and its eponymous King Krakus revolves around a dragon, or smok, who lived in a cave below Wawel Royal Castle and, as per the bad-dragon playbook, killed everybody and ate everything, including each knight Krakus sent to try to bring him down. An enterprising cobbler’s apprentice figured out that he could use the smok’s vast appetite to poison it. He filled a sheepskin with sulfur and pitch, which the smok predictably devoured, then, burning with thirst, drank the Vistula down to its riverbed and exploded in a cloud of sulfurous gas.

Kraków’s infamous Nazi occupation and the grinding decades of Communist rule couldn’t eradicate all the patrimony. The Nazis unwittingly preserved the city when they chose it as the capital of the General Government in 1939, meaning they didn’t bomb it as they overran Poland. It is extraordinary that the city was likewise not bombed to smithereens by the RAF or the U.S. Army Airforce after March 1944, when they controlled European skies—Kraków was after all a crucial logistical hub for the Nazis, who not only built the Płaszów work camp within its boundaries but also administered from here the nearby Auschwitz proper and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. In January 1945, the city was spared once again as the Russians harried the Nazis out with little resistance—meaning, without the Nazis blowing it up, as they tried to do at Auschwitz, and without trademark Soviet artillery stomping. Three times is the charm.

Sixty-seven years on: The buffed and polished eight-hundred-year-old Rynek Główny, the Main Market Square, can accommodate some three thousand people out of doors at the tables of its chockablock cafés. On this sunny early-summer day, the thrum of conversation rings the Sukiennice, which still serves as a market hall in the square. On the square’s north side, the groomed and plumed draft horses of the hansom cabs stamp their feet, keen to be moving. The city’s main stage and proscenium is ready for its actors.

One special tourist is slated to make his debut today. A police chopper, rare in Kraków, worries the air above the square. On the north side of the Sukiennice, three police vans bustle in close to the stately fourteenth-century Pałac Bonerowski hotel, at the corner of Ulica Sw. Jana, or St. John Street.

The eleven-table Dawno Temu Na Kazimierzu (“Long Ago in Kazimierz”) serves traditional Polish and Jewish fare in an all-wood, candlelit room—very 1800s. From left: Her coat by Nicolas Andreas Taralis, hat by Scala, necklace by Robert Lee Morris, gloves by Bottega Veneta; his boots by Frye, hat by MaxMara, coat by Ann Demeulemeester; his coat, shirt, vest, and pants by Prada; gloves by Sandro; boots by Versace. Hair and makeup by Laura Dominique at Streeters.

At three stories tall, the Sukiennice bisects the great square. On its roof, a black-clad sharpshooting team appear between the crenelations, one sniper, one spotter. They comb the cafés below them for possible assassins among the thousand or so tourists, beginning with Café Milano, the pleasant outdoor jumble of tables and couches in front of the Pałac Bonerowski, where I’m sitting. Occasionally, they focus together on a target—for instance, me as I photograph them.

Under the snipers, a long motorcade piles in: more police, two dozen diplomats in comically identical black suits and white shirts, and then, in a limousine, the mystery tourist himself, the premier of China, Wen Jiabao. Wen waves wanly at the café crowd from behind the bulletproof glass. No one waves back. He’s been in Poland for three days on an economic “mission,” in the sense of shopping for a place to put money. He’s looking at whole swaths of the Polish economy—factories, infrastructure, “cooperative” ventures—and now he’s being given a royal look at Kraków. It’s as telling an index as there is of Poland’s deft sidestepping of Europe’s extreme financial woes. Heavy hitter though he is, Wen may be a tad late to the business side of Kraków’s party.

“Right now there are over sixty multinational corporations doing business in Kraków,” says Mateusz Żurawik, twenty-six, a reporter for the Gazeta Wyborcza, the major national newspaper, “most of them insourcing and outsourcing firms. Kraków first won Lufthansa’s back office in 2002, and over the last decade the others moved in. Motorola’s got its back office here now, and the American investment management firm State Street will add 1,600 jobs here by 2014.”

One of the main fruits of Kraków’s earlier royal boom is the massive Jagiellonian University, founded by King Kazimierz the Great in 1364. It’s Europe’s second-oldest university—after Charles University in Prague—but the first to have a chair in mathematics and astronomy. Mikolaj Kopernik, or Nicolaus Copernicus, the wealthy Silesian trader’s son who at a stroke revolutionized science with his heliocentric vision of the spheres, studied math and astronomy at the Jagiellonian between 1491 and 1495 and later taught there. Today Kraków, with twenty other colleges and secondary schools, is a miniature Boston, a natural magnet for Poland’s intellectual elite and thus a big draw for multinational investment. The students aren’t being recruited to work in London or Paris; they’re being recruited to stay home because the companies are moving to Kraków to employ them, a delightful reversal of the early-90s brain drain in Eastern Europe.

The 900-year-old Wawel Royal Castle was the seat of Poland’s mightiest kings—and its legendary dragon. Her jacket, skirt, and pants by Prada; shoes by Jimmy Choo; tights by Wolford; rings by Noir and R. J. Graziano.

“The rule for students here is, the more exotic your third language, the better you get paid,” says Żurawik, a Jagiellonian graduate who himself speaks English which is so accent-free that he could be a Wharton grad working on Wall Street. “So, they’re speaking Russian, Finnish, Japanese—whatever. The Kraków University of Economics is offering a course for the people who’ll be running Royal Dutch Shell in Poland.”

Żurawik is also emblematic of a second, more soulful tributary of the population flow back to Kraków, namely, that of young Poles of Jewish heritage. They’re not exactly returning, since these new young Krakovians are not all Krakovians but, like Żurawik, came as students from across Poland. The Kazimierz district, the former Jewish quarter, remains the magnet for many older native Krakovian Jewish families who were driven into the diaspora, as the row of Jewish restaurants on Szeroka Street and the busloads of tourists pouring into the areas’s fabled old synagogues attest. But the magnet in Kazimierz for the new locals, the sons and daughters of Polish-Jewish families who survived the Holocaust and remained in Poland, is the Jewish Community Center, founded in 2008 in an impressive new building on Miodowa Street.

“If you grew up in Poland in a family of Jewish heritage, your family never really talked about the Holocaust, or about being Jewish during the Communist time,” Żurawik says. “They’d say something like, ‘Okay, we survived.’ When I came to Kraków to study, I found the JCC in Kazimierz, and there, a group of people like me. Everybody’s curious about what it means to be Jewish in Poland. At last year’s Night of the Synagogues, which is held every July, we were expecting maybe two thousand people. Ten thousand showed up.”

The other ruling cohort in Kazimierz is the fashion and art crowd, the Krakovian equivalent of the hipoisie one would find in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, the Marais in Paris, or London’s East End. They—designers, photographers, musicians, boutique and café owners—are the driving force around Plac Nowy. New Square—“new” because the building stock is a range of nineteenth-century Hapsburg houses—hosts a funky flea market by day, and by night the restaurants and bars light up until four or five.

The centuries-old Wieliczka Salt Mine features, among other chambers, the “Grand Ballroom,” where this image was shot. Her coat by Ann Demeulemeester, dress and headband by Dolce&Gabbana, necklace by Barbara Bui.

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The two bars that anchor Plac Nowy are Alchemia, on the north side, popular for its live music in the cellar, and Singer, on the east side, at eighteen years old one of the original early-1990s Kazimierz outposts. Singer is not a karaoke bar. Its owner, Grzegorz Wróbel, fitted the café with antique sewing tables that still have the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foot trestle–powered sewing machines bolted to the tops, some of which were actually made by the Singer company. Sit in Singer with the assorted hipsters who pound shots until the wee hours and your centerpiece is the relic of an old Kraków family—and an apt metaphorical echo of the medieval fabric traders who established the fourteenth-century market in Sukiennice.

“Kazimierz was quite rough after 1989,” Wróbel explains. “At night, Plac Nowy was a place where you could get beaten up. Lots of criminality. The trend in bars up around the Rynek Główny at the time was to have everything modern and slick, but my friends and I just wanted to have a place to go that we liked. So we started buying furniture from all the old families around Kazimierz. I was in this flat, and the man said, do you want the sewing table too? We brought it back, and the machine looked so good and so friendly, and was such a local thing, that I thought, that’s it, we’re keeping it. And after that we started actually looking for them.”

Few arenas of city life provide a more accurate reading of civic pride, and state finances, than the commitment of governments to the arts. In 2011, as the European banking crisis rolled through Madrid, Berlin, Paris, Lisbon, Dublin, and London, and as Athens literally erupted in flames, government leaders across the Continent cracked down on spending. In Kraków last year, the city fathers broke ground on a $108 million civic complex called the Congress Center, with three performance spaces on the Vistula’s south bank, facing Wawel Royal Castle. And the Juliusz Słowacki Theater completed a new $10 million, two-stage theater and media studio—the Małopolska Garden of Arts—which opens with a gala this month.

Both these graceful, practical, and innovative structures were designed by the award-winning Kraków architect Krzysztof Ingarden and his partner, Jacek Ewy. It’s one thing to spend $108 million on a new civic performance complex; it’s quite another to fit that into a medieval town.“Places like Kraków require a contemporary architecture that can continue the dialogue with history,” says Ingarden, fifty-five, over coffee in his office, “We wouldn’t like to lose this delicate link of locality, between the place and its time. There’s a famous sort of chocolate made here called the Kraków mixture, with a bit of everything in it. For the elevation of the Congress Center that faces the town, we use a mixture of stone and ceramics, materials that are familiar to people, but in a modern context. For the new Słowacki Theater building, we took the bricks from the old nineteenth-century riding hall, cleaned them, and literally remade the facade.”

Wieliczka Salt Mine workers hollowed out the space that is now the “Grand Ballroom” as a chapel; it’s made entirely of salt. Her dress by Marchesa, boots by Bottega Veneta, headband by Dolce&Gabbana.

Every Central and Eastern European city, from Tiranë to Tallinn to Minsk, grapples with its version of lost time, the sixty-year historical elision imposed by Nazi and then Communist rule from the 1930s to 1989. Even within that constellation, Kraków’s situation is unusually fraught. To be a citizen of Kraków in the second half of the twentieth century was to be in the belly of the beast.

Which is why Oskar Schindler’s story is so riveting. The famously enterprising German manager of Kraków’s enamelware factory, in the Podgórze district on the south side of the Vistula, managed to convince the Nazi government of Poland that his product—the stuff that millions of people cooked and ate from, including the army—was essential to the Third Reich’s success. The hundreds of Jewish workers he saved were just a breath away from that more common fate.

Kraków got a jump on analyzing its role in the Holocaust when Steven Spielberg and his crew arrived in 1993, a couple of years after the fall of communism, and began filming the Schindler story. The city landmarked the factory, and pulled together enough money by 2010 to open a museum at Schindler’s Fabrik that today draws some 200,000 visitors a year to its multimedia halls.

The curators have opted for an unflinching look at the deliberate constriction of life under the Nazis for everybody in Kraków. It’s all depicted in detail: the actual Nazi edicts; the slow but sure segregation of the population; and then, as the machinery of the Holocaust kicks into high gear, the examples of great courage, such as Schindler’s, and great cowardice, such as the denunciations that led to the camps. The names of the villains and the names of the heroes are there for all to see. Most moving are Schindler’s actual office, which includes his desk, and the huge, floor-to-ceiling list of names of the surviving Jews—“Schindler’s Jews”—inscribed on the inside of a circular wall whose outer surface is aptly protected by steel pots.

“Hands down,” says Marcin Lewicki, the upbeat forty-ish editor of Kraków’s Lounge magazine, “Adam Chrząstowski is the most interesting chef in Kraków, and in Poland. Probably in Europe. Of course, he’s a total madman.”

He means that Chrząstowski is mad in the delightful sense of being a diehard locavore, along the lines of Napa’s Alice Waters or London’s Fergus Henderson. Innovative Polish chefs—the ones who stayed at home—cooked “other” cuisines, Italian or, if high-end, French. Poland’s rethinking of Polish cuisine is now under way. Chrząstowski is the original local patriot, this revolution’s Thomas Paine.

With its cobblestone streets and aging brick buildings, Kraków’s perfectly preserved Kazimierz, or Jewish Quarter, is one of the city’s most interesting areas: There’s a cozy bar or restaurant on every corner, and the Galicia Jewish Museum—a block from where this photo was taken—celebrates modern Polish Jewish culture and commemorates Holocaust victims. Her jacket, skirt, belt, and scarf, all by Haider Ackermann; hat by MaxMara; bag by Maison Martin Margiela; tights by Wolford; boots by Ferragamo.

“It takes about two or three days until they get tired of Italian food in the hotels and come to us,” Chrząstowski, forty-four, jokes as we sit over espresso in the elegant front lounge of Ancora, his restaurant on Ulica Dominikańska, just south of the Dominican church. “Every great cuisine rests on two legs. The first is the beautiful countryside—meaning the things that the farmers’ wives cook. The second leg is what happens in the kitchens of the aristocracy, which was at a good level in Poland before World War II, and then under communism it just froze. So we need to take that and give it life.”

Ancora’s menu is built around artisanal Polish fish and game. “We have beautiful duck, goose, pheasant, and quail,” Chrząstowski says, “and our forest is aboriginal, so the venison is quite good. They eat the forest fruits, the many berries, and we can bring those in. In our lakes and rivers we have the pike perch, the sturgeon, and the crayfish. From the North Sea we have great salmon and turbot. We have enough base, is what I’m saying, for a beautiful national cuisine.”

He’s not kidding. Chrząstowski starts me off with a tray of beef tartare and foie gras; I order the luscious, nutty-tasting rare loin of venison as my main, after which the chef brings two tart country cheeses in which you can almost taste the grass—a pecorino and a creamy blue, rivaling anything in England or France. He tops it off by serving a wild rowanberry confit and a delicate, unsugary goat’s milk–based halvah, harking back to Kraków’s Byzantine trade and the Ottoman wars. In the dessert is a whisper of Istanbul.

Nights in Kraków tend to run long. By 1 a.m., the photographer Piotr Kierat and I have had dinner among the Bentley and Ducati owners at Nova Resto Bar, on Ulica Estery in Kazimierz, and are working on our nightcaps around the corner at the aptly named Alchemia, at whose scuffed stone tile bar pretty much everybody begins, or ends, their evening march. Our sojourn in Alchemia is jolly, what with the mock-ominous display of ancient laboratory flagons on the shelves and the two-foot-long stuffed baby alligator dangling stiffly on cords over the bartenders’ heads. The lab glass and the baby gator are the bar’s own mashup joke on the medieval habit of distilling the essence of ugly or dangerous animals for potion manufacture.

Eau de gator is not on Alchemia’s drinks menu, but other potables are in ready supply. At the table are Piotr’s friends Wojtek and Magda. Wojtek worked in London for a decade, so he keeps asking, “Cheersmate-you-awry?”—one word, swallowing the last t cockney-style and then cackling as he orders new rounds of drinks despite our attempts to reassure him that we are, in fact, all right. Very Krakovian, I’m learning: You cannot possibly be all right unless you have a drink in hand, or another en route.

In any ordinary town all this would have ended there, but Piotr develops an itch to walk across the river to a bar at the foot of the new pedestrian bridge connecting Kazimierz to Podgórze, the loft district south of the river. The move is more about the walk than the drink. Piotr’s friend Tomek, a sturdy young chef at a fashionable sushi restaurant, has just gotten off the line and is game. The three of us strike out.

“Hey,” Piotr says just before we reach the river, “look there.”

A ferret slips like a streak of molten silver over the cobbles, approaches a parked car, rises on its hind legs, and madly attempts to paw its way in through the little gap between the front and rear doors, like a car thief trying to break in before the cops come.

“Maybe he wants to eat the insulation,” Piotr says with a shrug, “sharpen his teeth on the engine.”

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By definition, any walk in or around the center of Kraków becomes a pilgrimage through some chunk of medieval history. The time-machine effect in Kazimierz is intense—King Kazimierz established the district just outside the city walls in 1335; a hundred years later, it was settled by Jews fleeing the many pogroms. Five- and six-hundred-year-old synagogues brood over the streets. In this place, then, the fact that a ferret is attempting to eat any kind of mechanical device is less a twenty-first-century oddity and more a spooky nocturnal encounter which, half a millennium ago, would have led to the animal’s likeness being emblazoned on a shingle over a pub—U Szalonego Freta (“At the Sign of the Mad Ferret”). The omen from this little beast is that our night is about to achieve liftoff in some super-quirky way, so we’d better strap in for the ride.

It doesn’t take long. The Vistula is an ox-bowed river of great beauty at Kraków, and the bridges cross it at funny angles, everything akimbo, both upstream from the Wawel Castle massif and downstream. The Podgórski footbridge, a dramatic suspension bridge by the Kraków architect Andrzej Getter, opened in 2010 and is the newest. By 2:30 a.m., under a hazy three-quarter moon, we have crossed it and settled into our beers at an outside table looking back at Kazimierz. As we watch, a man descends the Kazimierz riverbank, unpacks a tenor sax, and blows a lean, magisterial Lester Young–style improvisation across the water. He seems to want to work out a solo in the shape of the footbridge. It’s funny and sad and strange and rather perfect. Then he stops.

The three of us jump from the table and run to the river, yelling in unison: “Więcej! Więcej!” (“More! More!”). Long seconds pass. Bidding us good night, the sax man teases out a soft encore of curling arpeggios, like smoke rising off a cigarette.

We’re back at the table when Piotr says in his dry fashion, “You know, there are many ways to cross the river, and some of them can be dangerous.”

It’s hilarious and horrific: A man on the Podgórze side has mounted the bridge’s great arched steel spine and is walking briskly across it to Kazimierz. There is no rail on this huge cylinder, it’s not meant to be walked. It rises a hundred feet over the river—the bridge’s wooden walkways are suspended from it. The daredevil strides out across its back, not a molecule of doubt in his body—as if he’s rushing between trams, late for a business appointment on a Monday morning. We can see him every step of the way, his head bobbing in the bridge spotlights.

The cavelike Alchemia, near Plac Nowy, attracts a hipster crowd. From left: Her pants, blouse, and shirt by Gucci; boots and bag by Ferragamo; rings by John Hardy; cuff by Sergio Rossi; necklace by Dolce&Gabbana; his shirt and jacket by Dries Van Noten; scarf by Thomas Pink; his shirt by Calvin Klein; pants, sweater, and coat by Dior; hat by MaxMara.

Many bad factors are in play. He’s working an eight- to ten-inch-wide path of secure footing on an eight-foot-round steel cylinder that runs 160 yards across the Vistula. As in any marine environment, there’s a lot of slick paint on the steel. It’s after three in the morning, so there’s dew on everything close to the river, especially on the bridge. One foot placed a few inches to the right or left of this skinny little purchase on life and it’s a quick slip, followed by a hundred-foot drop through a dense lattice of steel struts to the water—provided he’s Batman enough not to hit the struts en route to the swim.

So we’re glad when he makes it across the river without doing that.

We break camp and head back. On the Kazimierz side, where the big steel arch meets its anchorage in the ground, at the spot where the madman dismounted, we find an empty bottle of Crimean prosecco. It’s 3:30 a.m. So far, we’ve received the omen from the ferret, the music knave has played, and the madman has defied Death. The night is young.

As Piotr, Tomek, and I go deeper into Kazimierz, we stroll across a small green median. An adolescent badger arrives at our feet. He’s a spiky little fellow, personable and extremely busy.

“It’s about time somebody decided to spice up this party,” I tell them. “It’s been such a slow night.”

He scuttles this way and that between our feet like a little spiny Hacky Sack. It’s as if he’s strolled over to cadge a smoke while on his way to the next adolescent-badger rave, which, clearly, must be happening about this time of night in Kraków’s lively alternative cosmos of medieval animals.

First light is not long off; the birds are beginning to stir. My flat in Ulica Szeroka, deep in the magical cluster of Kazimierz synagogues, lies well east, so I peel off with my bike, reluctantly bidding Piotr, Tomek, and the badger farewell.

It’s dawn by the time I get back. I receive a cryptic text from Piotr: We found the saxophonist.

I don’t know what it means until he tells me the next day. The saxophonist lay drunk on some church steps with friends, his beautiful tenor in its case fifty yards away in the churchyard. It’s an old tableau: Legless, they had turned to the church for respite. Piotr picked up the abandoned instrument and trudged it back over to the little group, laying it gently at their feet. They looked up at him, so drunk they might as well have been fish. Then Piotr uttered one of his bone-dry epigrams that hold so much.